As a developer, I truly believe that sharing knowledge through a newsletter is one of the best ways to grow an audience — and eventually monetise your efforts.
Substack is built for a general audience, not devs. I was missing code highlighting and minimalist design.
I wanted to build something dedicated for developers: - open-source, free to use, self-hosted - beautiful code highlighting - markdown-first writing - clean, minimalist design - dark mode support
I believe that an open-source model is a great way to build a product. IndiePubStack is: - fully open-source and free to use (MIT licence) - designed to be self-hosted (Docker image distribution) - built on top of reliable services (Kinde for auth, Resend for email delivery)
All you need is an inexpensive VPS and a domain name, free Kinde and Resend accounts (that will be enough for a long time).
I'm already using IndiePubStack for my personal blog and newsletter.
The future depends on the community feedback, if the open-source project gets some traction, the next logical step will be to build a SaaS platform on top of it.